Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  “Well, your assurance certainly makes me feel a whole lot better. Now I have complete faith in the—what was it you called it? The course of your investigation?”

  “That’s correct.”

  My father stopped pacing. He took a step closer to the chief of police and held him in his gaze. “Those men are part of this. Maybe they weren’t working alone. Maybe someone else took her out to that island, I don’t know. It’s not my job to know—it’s your job. But I know one way or another they’re involved, and you know it, too.”

  “I understand you are very upset.”

  “Oh, yes, upset. That’s just what I am.”

  “I have some questions for you, sir, but perhaps we should continue this conversation at a later time.”

  “By all means, let’s proceed.” My father spread his hand in withering invitation.

  The chief of police hesitated a moment, then continued. “Had you noticed any changes in your daughter recently?”

  “What kind of changes?”

  “For example, had she been agitated? Had she engaged in any reckless behavior? Had she been not herself or had she perhaps exhibited any signs of depression?”

  My father laughed then, cold, hollow laughter. “So that’s the story you want! Can’t have a murder, can we? Bad for business, I’m sure.”

  “The only story we want is the truth.”

  “The truth is Alison is the very definition of a kid you don’t have to worry about.” He paused. “Was.”

  “I understand.”

  “Really? Because I’m not sure you do, so you listen very carefully. My daughter was killed here, on your island, and if I get the impression that you aren’t really looking for the truth, I promise you I will get on every news network in America and call for a total boycott of your pretty little island, and I will not rest until every last dive shop and rum bar shuts down.”

  “I understand, sir. Thank you for your time.”

  * * *

  A WEEK after Alison was found, we flew home. My father pulled two suitcases through the airport on Saint X, his and Alison’s. How small we were, the three of us, barely a family at all.

  “Time to go back to reality,” the man seated beside my mother on the plane said sociably as we pulled away from the gate.

  My mother smiled and nodded politely. She closed her eyes and did not open them again until we touched down in New York.

  I had a window seat. As the plane lofted into the sky, I pressed my nose to the pane. At first the island filled the window. But quickly it reduced to a thin slash in the pale sea. Within seconds it was gone and we were moving through a vast heath of cloud.

  * * *

  MY BRAIDS turned limp and scraggly. Frizz haloed my scalp. There would be no grand moment of showing the braids off at school, and this disappointment still stung even in light of what had happened. Most of the time, my parents seemed not to notice how wild my hair had become. But at odd moments, one or the other of them seemed to see me vividly; they would look at the braids, then reach out to touch them as if they were some sort of curious relic.

  Finally, the night before Alison’s funeral, my father had me stand in front of the bathroom mirror. He unwound the rubber bands, dropped the beads into a plastic bowl, and uncoiled the braids one by one. He worked with exquisite gentleness. I think this was a necessary ritual for him, one he’d put off until he was ready for it. My hair tangled around his fingers. Loose strands floated to the floor.

  “All done,” he said hoarsely when the braids were out. Then he wandered off down the hall.

  * * *

  HUNDREDS OF people came to the funeral. High school and college classmates of Alison’s, women who’d served on PTA committees with my mother, colleagues and clients of my father’s. Even, in an uncomfortable gesture, the ambassador from Saint X to the United States.

  The funeral is mostly a blur. Too many people. Too much perfume in the air. An itchy gray dress, purchased hurriedly for me by one of my mother’s friends. What I remember most is the beautiful teenagers crying. After the service, they gathered in tight clusters on the sidewalk outside the church. The girls wore black dresses that exposed their legs and cleavage. They must not have owned clothing appropriate for a funeral, or maybe they did but chose these skimpy outfits instead because they relished this rare opportunity to explore a sad, tragic sensuality. They cried in the arms of solemn boys who, cast into this moment, appeared spontaneously to have been made into men. Among them, most beautiful of all, was Drew McNamara. Drew was my sister’s high school sweetheart. They began dating in the spring of their freshman year and remained inseparable until my sister broke up with Drew the week before leaving for college. I had been heartbroken when she did it—I had believed I would scatter rose petals down the aisle at their wedding. Now here he stood, one among them. I looked around at them, these alive girls and boys, so attractive in their grief while I felt so wrong, a freak, in my own.

  * * *

  IN THOSE early months after Alison’s death, the investigation consumed both of my parents, though it consumed them differently. My father took a leave from work; Alison became his full-time occupation. He was in frequent communication with the FBI, and he called the police on Saint X constantly to monitor the progress of their investigation, which he became increasingly convinced was not inept, but rather a dexterous charade intended to preserve the island’s reputation as a place you could take your family, your kiddos and wives and pretty daughters. His desk in the basement was covered with papers and files. At one point, he even hired a private investigator to dig into Clive Richardson and Edwin Hastie, though I don’t believe anything ever came of this.

  My mother retreated into herself. Though she did not speak of it, it was clear to me that her thoughts never wavered from what had happened. I could see questions and theories spinning behind her distant gaze. Sometimes I overheard her speaking to herself: “I know it. I know it.” In books and movies, the bedrooms of dead children become temples—untouched, everything preserved just as they left it. But my mother lived in Alison’s room. I would return from school to a silent house and know she was in there, curled up in Alison’s sheets. One day I opened the bedroom door to find her sitting at Alison’s desk, cupping something in her hands. It was a nest of Alison’s hair, pulled from her yellow brush.

  For my part, if before Alison’s death I had been prone to some mildly compulsive behavior, in the aftermath this spiraled into a genuine affliction. I felt the prickling in my fingertips, the need to write in the air, constantly. Alison. Alison. Alison. I also developed a second, intertwined compulsion of thinking up scenarios in which those I loved might die. It was a ritual of protection: If I imagined a specific death, it seemed nearly impossible that it would actually happen in exactly that way, so the more scenarios I imagined, the safer the people I loved became. After my mother tucked me in at night I lay awake for hours, tracing Alison’s name while conjuring visions of my parents lying in parallel hospital beds succumbing to a rare infection, of our dog Fluffernutter crushed by a falling tree limb, and crying because I was exhausted and desperate for sleep and my powerlessness in the face of these rituals terrified me. I wanted to wake my parents but knew I mustn’t add to their worries. I faced the long night hours alone, until the sky began to lighten and, my watch completed, my mind finally released me to sleep.

  * * *

  DEPENDING ON where you lived then, maybe you remember how brutal the winters were in the mid-nineties, how the Eastern Seaboard bore nor’easter after nor’easter from December straight through April. During those winters, a good number of Americans found themselves stuck inside for months on end, huddled around televisions and desperate to be entertained. If you were one of them, you will remember how Alison was all over the news the winter she was killed, as Nancy and Tonya and JonBenét were during other winters around that time. It seemed the national appetite craved—demanded, even—a dramatic story about an American beauty. (Nancy in all those crysta
ls, glittering across the Lillehammer ice. JonBenét the way I loved her best, sans makeup, as my mother would say, her natural brown hair waving out of a cowboy hat, a red bandana around her slender neck.) News vans loitered on our suburban cul-de-sac for weeks. I was forbidden from playing in the front yard. But one day I disobeyed this rule. It had snowed the night before. While my parents were still asleep, I put on my snow pants and my puffy purple jacket and slipped out the front door. I clomped through the knee-deep snow, lay down on my back, and fanned my arms and legs back and forth. I looked up at the sky. It was white, but the color didn’t seem to reside anywhere. It was like the turquoise in the water at Indigo Bay, colors that were everywhere and nowhere. Had my sister slid into the infinity between color and object? Was she out there, in some incomprehensible elsewhere, watching me? Inside my mittens, my hands worked furiously. Alison. Alison. Alison.

  A few minutes later my father opened the door and shooed me inside. That night, my mother was draining pasta for dinner with the small white television in the kitchen tuned to the local station, when there I was, swishing my arms and legs through the snow. “The search for answers in the death of local teen Alison Thomas continues,” a woman in a magenta blazer said. “Meanwhile, on this snowy day, her sister could be seen making angels.”

  * * *

  IN APRIL, the chief of police on Saint X called our house. We had just sat down to dinner. My father answered the call on the phone that hung on the wall beside the stove, and I watched as he listened, twisting and untwisting the cord. The chief of police had called to inform him in advance that he would be holding a press conference the next day, at which he would announce that all suspects in my sister’s case had been cleared, and the department had concluded there was not sufficient evidence that Alison had died as the result of a violent crime to continue the investigation.

  My father flew into a rage. I don’t remember what he said, but I do remember his shouting, and how I looked down at the drumstick and green beans on my plate like maybe if only I stared hard enough it would all go away—this moment and all the others since I had awoken to find my sister gone. When my father’s shouts became choked with sobs I thought I would be sick. I began to trace Alison’s name furiously on the kitchen table.

  “Stop that, Clairey,” my mother said.

  I wanted so badly to stop for her, but I couldn’t. My eyes filled with tears. She put her hand over mine, but I shook it off. I cried harder, pressed my fingertip against the tabletop so hard it hurt.

  “Clairey, please,” she begged.

  My body began to tremble.

  Then my mother knelt next to my chair and looked straight at me. For the first time in months her eyes seemed animated not by some scene playing out in her mind, but by the present we shared. Though I was much too old to be carried, she lifted my tensed body out of the chair. I let myself go slack in her arms, and she carried me upstairs and tucked me into bed. She stayed there with me, stroking my hair, until I was asleep.

  * * *

  A FEW weeks later, my parents surprised me with the news that my Aunt Caroline would be taking me to Paris. A present for my eighth birthday, they said. Aunt Caroline was my mother’s older sister. She had never married and had no children. She lived in the East Village and was the only adult I knew who smoked. For a week she and I shared a little chambre in the Marais. Every morning we had bread with butter and raspberry jam and espresso at a café in the Place des Vosges. (“See how butter tastes like butter here,” Aunt Caroline said.) I forced the espresso down, trying to convince myself I liked its sophisticated intensity. We did not go to the Eiffel Tower or Versailles, nor to any of the kid-friendly attractions my parents would have sought out: wax museums, puppet shows. We did what Aunt Caroline called “being flâneuses.” We wandered. If we passed a fromagerie with logs of goat cheese pressed with lavender in the window, we bought some. We ate long leisurely dinners during which Aunt Caroline drained carafes of plum-dark wine. We lazed in parks all afternoon.

  Alison had never been to Paris. I had nibbled a brioche aux pralines in the Luxembourg Gardens and she never would. I would have this on her forever. I would have every day on her for the rest of my life. In Paris with Aunt Caroline, I finally began to understand that my sister was not gone the way she’d been gone when she was off at college—vanished from my days but still out there, living her life. She was gone not just from me and my parents and Drew McNamara, but also and above all from herself. My parents’ grief might lessen, I might heal, Drew might move on, but Alison’s loss—of a future, a life—would never change.

  On the plane back over the Atlantic, Aunt Caroline slept with her mouth snapped open like a crocodile’s for seven straight hours. I remained awake. I was anxious about returning home. I was wary of my father and even more so of my mother—how when I got home she would squeeze me in her arms so tightly I would be able to feel her thinly veiled terror that I, too, might vanish.

  But when my parents met us at the airport, my mother’s smile was light and clean. She’d gotten a haircut. My whole life her hair had come down past her shoulders; now it barely skimmed her chin. She was wearing a blue chambray dress and sandals.

  “Did you have the very best time?” she asked.

  Things were different after that. My father went back to work. If he continued to be in contact with the police on Saint X, he kept it to himself. When I got home from school in the afternoons, my mother was no longer in Alison’s room; she was waiting for me in the kitchen with a glass of milk and a plate of Oreos. Always a voracious reader, she began to check out books from the library again. My father rejoined his Sunday squash game. At night from my bedroom I sometimes caught the faint sound of a laugh track—they were watching Murphy Brown in bed.

  Every so often in the years that followed, my parents received a briefing from the police. A former maid at Indigo Bay had remembered something that might turn out to be consequential. A man from Chicago had called with a tip that seemed bogus, but which the police would of course pursue with diligence and expediency. My parents did not fixate on these developments, and in the end none of them ever amounted to anything.

  When someone asked my mother how many children she had, her response was always the same. “We had two daughters but our eldest was killed.”

  This, in our house, was the final word on Alison. She was killed. Passive voice. As if Alison were the recipient of a fate inflicted by nobody.

  * * *

  THAT SUMMER, my parents sold our house and we moved across the country to Pasadena. I was angry at my parents about our move. I thought they wanted to forget Alison. I see now that we didn’t have much of a choice. The victims of tragedies almost always depart, sooner or later. Everybody in our small suburb knew what had happened to us. Cody Lundgren’s mother had made me sad and uncomfortable when I saw her at the grocery store, and now we did this to other people wherever we went. To stay would have been, frankly, inconsiderate. (The Lundgrens had decamped for Philadelphia not long after Cody’s death.)

  In New York, we had lived in a large white center-hall Colonial. There had been five bedrooms, a swimming pool out back; Alison and I each had our own bathroom. Everyone I knew lived this way, and I was young enough not to understand that most people didn’t. But we lived differently in Pasadena. We moved into a small sage-colored bungalow in the hills. My mother hung wind chimes along the eaves. In New York we’d had a sprawling acre of lawn; here there was a tiny jewel-box garden. Our home in Pasadena was not inexpensive by any means, and we still lived in the sort of neighborhood that would be described as “prestigious” in a real estate listing. But the little bungalow was decidedly, intentionally, modest. If I found myself in the car with my mother, driving past some newfangled McMansion or an ersatz Spanish revival estate in Oak Knoll, she would scoff and say, “So tacky,” and I understood she meant much more—that the people who lived there were drawing the universe’s eye, leaving their good fortune out in the open, when they ought to be
secreting it away.

  The night before the first day of third grade, I told my parents that at my new school I wanted to go by my middle name. I could feel them exchanging meaningful looks over my head.

  “Try it out,” my father said. “You can always go back to Claire if you change your mind.”

  I never did. From that day on, I was Emily.

  * * *

  EVERYTHING CHANGED for me in Pasadena. I’d always been a reticent, prickly child, more comfortable in the company of my family than with my peers. I had struggled to make friends and accustomed myself to spending time alone. But in Pasadena I was new and therefore presumed interesting. Soon I was playing school and orphans in the purple enclaves of other girls’ bedrooms. To my surprise, I found myself sharing with these girls the intimacy of friendship. We confessed our secrets; stuck out our tongues and touched the tips together, giggling at the contact of wriggling, tasteless muscle; carved sacred spaces in the putty of our suburban world—forts and clubhouses, hideaways in the rhododendrons. The compulsions that had plagued me for so long faded away, evaporating in the dry air of my new life. For a very long time, until the winter of my twenty-fifth year, which would find me in New York City, where events would transpire that would change everything for me again, and irrevocably, I didn’t think of them at all.

  * * *

  AT SOME point, my father must have taken the rolls of film from our vacation to be developed, because a few months after our move to Pasadena I found the photographs in his home office, in the back of his desk drawer. Every so often I would sneak into his office and take the photos out. My father had them printed in triplicate. I did not skip through the copies. I looked at each one with the same disbelief. How could it have been real? In one picture, Alison and I were building our sandcastle. In another, the two of us smiled for my father as the woman under the faded blue umbrella braided my hair. There was a series of pictures of Alison posing beside a palm tree. On the back of one of these pictures, in my father’s tidy all-caps penmanship: MY ALI. There were pictures of Alison and my mother walking on the beach, and of me examining a seashell with a look of wonder … swims and games and boat rides and half a dozen incomparably gorgeous sunsets. At first, I went to the photographs when I missed my sister. As time passed, I went to them when I had not missed her in a while and wanted to.